How to Select Middle Leaders
I was very fortunate to be joined for this interview by Dulwich College Singapore’s Director for Professional Learning and Development, Dan Brown. Below are 3 take-aways from the interview:
When we talk about recruiting middle leaders, we have to understand that this role is incredibly important in leading change initiatives. It's more than just identifying strengths and weaknesses or whether or not it's a role that they really want or they're willing to learn in. They have to have actually been able to demonstrate where they've taken the lead in change before regardless if they had a role in leadership. Can they demonstrate that they were proactive in leading some initiative as well as seeing it through and evaluating it?
Then when we take a look at identifying the attributes for a successful leader in our school. Dan talked about bringing it back to the mission and the vision because the interview is an opportunity to reinforce those things that are important to the school as well as to reinforce the culture that the leaders want to build. School leaders must identify specific value traits and then bring those into the interview where the candidate has to be able to demonstrate how they will have represented those types of values.
Lastly, you don't need to be the most experienced person to lead a team. There are times when you want experience especially with a new team but there are also times when the team might just need something else, somebody who is a little bit more dynamic, who has new ideas and lots of energy. So we have to differentiate our expectations for middle leaders based on what the needs of the team are, based on what the needs of the school are, and based on what those capabilities that the team leader has.
